At the recent Postgraduate Research conference of the School our group member Sin-Yuen Chang has won the First Year PhD poster prize for her poster entitled “The quest for a golden age in wastewater treatment”. Congratulations, Sin-Yuen!

It was announced today that the VERSOX soft X-ray spectroscopy beamline project at DIAMOND Light Source Ltd has been funded. Sven was one of the original proposers of this project, and as a member of the VERSOX Working Group he contributed to developing the case for supporting this beamline project. This beamline will provide our research team with a unique instrument for studying local interactions in organic materials, their nucleation – and surface chemistry in general. What makes VERSOX unique is its versatility – extending the use of soft X-ray spectroscopy beyond its traditional confines in ultra-high vacuum surface physics and chemistry. For example, soft X-ray studies of ‘wet’ soft matter, practical catalytic systems, biomaterials, pharmaceuticals, liquids and solutions will become possible for the first time in the UK. Right from the design stage the project will also take account of the needs of applied science and industrial users. As such it matches perfectly onto our research philosophy, which brings together fundamental science with its practical application.

A warm welcome to Dr Monika Walczak, who will join us in May as a postdoctoral research associate to work with X-ray spectroscopies on the surface chemistry of large organic molecules used as corrosion inhibitors. Monika joins us coming from her current appointment at the Polish Academy of Sciences and she will work both with our team and Rob Lindsay’s in the School of Materials.

Our group is part of this newly EPSRC-funded consortium. Project partners are in the School of Chemistry, the University of Lancaster, Imperial College London, the University of Reading, Idaho National Labs (USA), the UK National Nuclear Laboratory and Serco Assurance.